Bert O. StatesSeeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams
and DreamingYale UP, 1997

Introduction

This book is concerned primarily with the transit of waking experience into dreams,
and secondarily with the relationship between dreams and fictions written in the
light of day. But one of my assumptions is that whatever fictions do with our
experience was done first in the dream. By this I mean simply that the dream and
art, in all its varieties, are manifestations of the same biological need to convert
experience into structure, and that dreaming, in all likelihood, preceded art-making
in historical priority. If the structures produced are different, in either case,
the differences have to do mainly with the conditions of creation. These chiefly
involve the physiological differences between sleep and the waking state and the
personal vs. social ends served respectively by dream and art. In any case, the
need to produce both dreams and art seems to me biologically based.

This is a notion I hold with some deference to biologists because I am a literary
theorist by trade, albeit one with a lifelong interest in science. But all of
my reading suggests that we have kept biology and literature apart unnecessarily
long and that there is much to be gained by seeing what biological theory may
have in common with aesthetic and literary theory. The best, or at least most
enduring, explanation that literary people have made for the purpose of art is
that it is "useful and pleasing," utile et dulce, a doctrine that originates mainly
with Horace and can probably still be considered the on-going received theory.
Usefulness, when it is defined at all, normally implies a more or less educational
function whereby we learn to be better persons through our experience with art;
pleasure usually implies that we enjoy being moved by the images of art and, in
the worst versions of the idea, that art is a kind of sugar-coating that makes
the lesson of the pill easier to swallow.

Yet the world does not seem to have got any better over the centuries and one
can't even make the claim that people who are exposed to a great deal of art are
morally or ethically or in any other way better than people who aren't -- more
sensitive to the nuances of experience perhaps, but it would be hard to defend
even that claim. A few years ago the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and
Memory at UC Irvine announced "that 20 minutes of listening to a Mozart sonata
raised the measurable IQ of college students by up to 9 points" (Los Angeles
Times, Thursday, October 14, 1993, p. 1). This is certainly good news for
Mozart lovers and eventually it may have deeper implications for art at large.
Unfortunately, the boost in IQ lasted only ten minutes, so the jury is still out
on the usefulness of art, at least in the measurable sense.

I don't think the utile/dulce theory is wrong; I think its basis has been
insufficiently examined and this is where biology seems to me to enter the picture
as a helpful corrective. I take the position that art and dreaming are, in principle,
the same activity in that they involve the same or highly similar, mental processes
(the production of images and narratives based on human experience), and that
making art is no more elective, or voluntary, for the human being than dreaming.
By this I certainly don't mean that everyone is biologically compelled to paint
pictures, write stories or compose music but that we are all drawn, to one degree
or another, into "using" our imaginations, creating symmetries and designs or
in various ways refining our world beyond the needs of pure utility. If nothing
else, we all day-dream and draw doodles on napkins and these are forms of story-making
that must be doing something for us at a fairly unconscious level. So we all have
some innate stake in "the beautiful," and in this we are apparently different
from other species. Maybe.

But to come back to the point: dreaming is plainly a biological activity because
it is virtually universal among all species, mammals at least, and it occurs at
a distinct level of consciousness with distinct physical characteristics. Like
animals, humans are complex adaptive systems that process the information of daily
experience, converting it into memory that can be used to insure suitable behavior
for our survival. Memory, as the neuroscientist Steven Rose tells us, "is not
only about learning, but also about subsequently recalling that memory, retrieving
it" (1993, 316). And "each time we remember, we in some sense do work on and transform
our memories; they are not simply being called up from store and, once consulted,
replaced unmodified" (91). Memory, in short, is a dynamic process of up-dating
what we already have in mind, not simply a storage-house for what has already
happened. It is only a hunch, but it seems to me that dreams may be our clearest
window into this whole process of on-going conversion of experience into patterns
that help to maintain order in the system; that the dream does its work without
the least awareness that we, as dreamers, are looking in on it all and that the
dream is finally beneath our understanding in any more than the self-evident sense
in which dreams do reflect our concerns, fears and needs. Beyond this it is anyone's
guess as to what is going on in dreams or why such a mechanism is biologically
necessary; but for various reasons I will claim that the purpose of dreams has
little to do with keeping us self-informed, as if dream-work were an interior
alter ego, whispering messages and giving progress reports to the dreamer from
some mysterious clearing-house. I invite the reader, rather, to think of the dream
as a part of consciousness that, owing to the peculiar conditions of sleep, has
the astonishing property of appearing to us as if it had originated as an exterior
reality. To some extent this is also true of daydreams and other forms of memory
recalI in which we can momentarily become "lost to the world." But in the dream,
where the influence of external stimuli is minimized almost to the zero degree
and there is no inside-outside division, we are experiencing the revision of memory
itself as if it were taking place in a first and only time. I think of the dream
as a process which we, as dreamers, can observe from only one limited point of
view -- its veridical quality as experience -- and not as the natural processing
mechanism that it is.

In any event, there is a good possibility that dreams and art may be serving common
purposes, whatever these turn out to be, and that they have something to do with
our survival, as opposed to our edification and pleasure. What, one wonders, might
be the function of having pleasure (beyond its pleasurability)? The doctrine that
art is useful and pleasing, in short, ends where it should have begun. It is content
to take derivatives as causal explanations. All in all, claiming that art is useful
and pleasing, and leaving it at that, is rather like explaining mating and child-rearing
by saying that children are fun to have and they will eventually do chores around
the house.

My present goal, however, is not to explain what dreaming and art-making do for
us. That is a book that would be better written by a biologist, a brain scientist,
a philosopher, and perhaps an aesthetician, working in collaboration. I am concerned
primarily with the mechanisms that underlie each of these imaginative activities,
the ways they go about being what they are -- what they do to us, rather than
for us. I am particularly interested in the problem of authorship, or how the
human mind thinks up things that never happened and presents them (in the case
of the dream at least) in the mode of "the real." As I write, there is a current
rise of interest in consciousness theory and Darwinian evolution, both of which
have influenced my own thinking immensely. The view I hold now, as a consequence,
is that any comprehensive theory of dreaming or of art will have to begin at the
level of consciousness, prior to the formulation of narrative, theme, and what
is commonly referred to as meaning (as in the expression "What does this work
/ dream mean?"). In other words, we will have to begin well before the cat is
out of the cognitive bag.

Another of my assumptions is that if dreams mean anything the meaning is no different
in kind from the meaning that may be given to waking experience. If you want to
find out about yourself or what is "on" your mind, you can do just as well examining
what has passed during the day. Curiously, one rarely hears of anyone examining
the day -- or even a day dream -- for its meaning. For the most part, we take
each day for granted. Who has ever thought to ask, "What did my vacation in Maine
mean?" But a dream about the vacation is another matter. We like to believe that
dreams are "up to something," that the events they depict are deliberately charged
with a significance that the real experience (the vacation) did not have.

It is understandable that dreams would be one of the things that bedevil us with
questions about meaning. Dreams are, after all, events we make up in our heads
without any awareness of doing so or any power to prevent their occurring; they
seem to stand at once outside us, beyond reach, and deep within us in a queer
way that endows them with a subversive authority. Like Kafka's fictions, dreams
are dry and matter-of-fact in going about their business, however emotionally
involved we may get in them. I think, for instance, of Kafka's story "In the Penal
Colony" in which the prisoner's crimes are written on his body by an ingenious
etching machine. So too the dream-work etches stories of our fears, desires and
social practices on the body of the psyche. So it makes sense, the logic runs,
that dreams express things that are secretly on our minds, things we're not supposed
to know or didn't know we knew, given the fact that the dream never makes its
point clear (as allegories and didactic fictions do). And of course that makes
the dream all the more mysterious because it would seem to take as much cunning
to avoid making sense as it does to make sense. Hence Freud's famous theory of
censorship.

We say dreams express our hidden insecurity or our guilt. But it would be simpler
to say that we are insecure and guilty creatures, among other things, and that
quilt and insecurity (among other things) are on our minds during the day as well
as the night, otherwise we wouldn't dream about them; and therefore the meaning
of dreams is essentially the same as the meaning of the events of our waking life.
So one of my beliefs is that the dream is really doing much the same thing that
the mind/brain does during the day, only under different "working" conditions,
and it is these conditions that I will examine here.

Another part of the mystery is that dreams are largely about uneventful things:
I am teaching a class (sometimes brilliantly, sometimes poorly: about fifty-fifty),
I am trying to unload a refrigerator from the bed of a pick up truck, I am shopping
for a shirt, I am talking to my friend Dan who is riding a unicycle. These are
trivial things in the sense that they don't seem to "go" anywhere; they don't
lead to climaxes and they aren't climaxes of something that came before them.
They are very much like the things that happen in daily life, except that something
about the way they appear in dreams is different from the way we perceive them
in the waking state. And in this respect dreams have as much in common with art
as they have, in another way, with unmediated waking reality. The dream wipes
away all the excess of automatic waking behavior and "selects" (to use a metaphor)
only what can be charged with affect: if you were bored in a dream, you would
be vividly bored, precisely as a painting depicting a bored person (an Edward
Hopper, for example) might be a thrilling thing to look at. If you seem to be
going on a long walk in a dream, the dream will shorten it, just as the novelist
does ("Charles walked through the fields for hours, but at length he arrived at
the manor."). We accept this as a natural feature of dreams, as we do of the novel;
yet what agency in the dreaming brain has so rapidly abbreviated the plot in order
to avoid self-duplication of affect and how did it know where to go next? This
is a question I approach from several directions.

Dreaming and art-making, then, appear to share a "technique" of purification of
waking experience. They are essentializing processes, as aestheticians say. For
example, take off your sock and look at your foot. Nothing interesting there.
Now look at Michelangelo's sketch of a foot. It's the same foot, more or less
-- except that his foot isn't repulsive to look at. What has he done to the foot?
He has taken it out of the world of anatomy and put it into the world of resemblance.
He has caught the foot's way of being a foot by slightly enhancing certain foot-like
features. As Heidegger might say, he has "deconcealed" the foot (1975, 39); he
has taken the sock of familiarity off the foot. What he has done to the foot is
essentially what the dream does to the experiences of your waking life, and it
does it without thinking about it.

This is of course what art is all about: it asks you to look at things you haven't
been seeing -- Cézanne's rocks, Monet's lilies, Hopper's country gas stations.
Cézanne once said that he wanted above all else to paint the "world's instant,"
a wonderful phrase for what the world becomes when you look at it in the phenomenal,
or "thingly" mode. In my view, dreams are also a record of these instants, though
highly personalized and undeliberate: they drain things of their inconspicuousness;
relentlessly, it seems, the dream ransacks the day, passing (usually) over big
events, dramas that advance or undo us, without noticing them, alert only to the
small sin, the odd accident of behavior or the visual event that somehow catches
the world committing one of its habits: mother being perfectly herself, my friend
Paul saying something Paul-like, Mr. Sherk nervously bouncing chalk in his hand
during a chemistry lecture from my high school days. During the day you see someone
with stained imperfect teeth set off against an otherwise healthy complexion and
that night the teeth will show up on someone's face in a dream, a propos of nothing,
or at least nothing you know about. The teeth are of no more use or symbolic value
than Michelangelo's sketch of the foot (though psychoanalysis will tell you otherwise),
but they caught your attention, if only subliminally. And they showed up in the
dream as precisely right, perfectly imperfect teeth. So you are a Michelangelo
of sorts.

I'm not suggesting that this remarkable power is something the dream does deliberately,
in order to give us the pleasure that art gives us. To speak of the dream as being
"clever" or "cunning" or as "choosing," (as I will be doing) is strictly a form
of metaphorical shorthand: dreams do not have human qualities or drives. The dream
does these things to empirical experience because the conditions of dreaming can
only deal with experience in that way. You can't ask why the dream does it, unless
you put the question at the neurological level. Why? is an inappropriate question
to ask of the dream because it presupposes a conscious or unconscious motive,
a person in there somewhere, and there is no proof that dreams have motives of
any kind. Dreamwork is no more a volitional mechanism than any other function
of the body. However, one might ask what the possible relations between dream-making
and art-making might be; or one might even ask whether artmaking is necessarily
a more deliberate act for the species than dreaming.

Obviously, not all events in dreams are trivial. Occasionally, we are chased by
a huge beast and partially eaten, and of course this isn't trivial, though it
is usually painless. Or now and then I am teaching a class in my underwear (though
no one seems to notice). But this isn't really the main menu of dreams -- my dreams
anyway. I am much more likely to spend an entire dream trying to perform an impossible
task, trying to find something I've lost, or being lost, or trying to get home
on my bicycle with night approaching. In short, the matter of daily life raised
to the tenth power: getting and spending, being embarrassed, being late, being
caught in (or out of) my underwear, being overjoyed, or being overlooked. Most
tedious of all, being forced to perform the same mundane task over and over.

On the most obvious level, dreams are a form of time traveling, though one never
knows this in a dream. For instance, in a dream I go back to the schoolyard of
my boyhood, not as a boy but as the self that has simply endured as the center
of presence I call my self. I am neither old nor young -- I am always the "same"
age in dreams -- even though everybody else normally appears as I remember them.
This is the queer thing about consciousness. It doesn't age, it has no age. The
octogenarian geezer is a teen ager in thought -- one of the great frustrations
of life! Experience, maturity and wisdom have no more effect on consciousness
than what you can see through a window affects the window itself. Maybe an aging
consciousness forgets more things, or sees things differently, makes fewer mistakes
of a certain kind or more of another, but the window itself doesn't change. Consciousness
is what is always around, the one thing that is immune to the flux of time --
until, of course, it flickers and goes out.

The common factor of all thoughts in and about time, as Saint Augustine says in
my favorite discussion of time, is that each 'time' takes place in a present:
the present of things past (which Augustine calls memory), the present of things
future (expectation), and the present of things present (sight). This is wonderflly
simple, but it is the bottom line of what can be said about time. There is, indeed,
nothing else but the present, and of course "it" is always traveling, always coming
and going, poised on the knife edge of this specious now that even philosophers
cannot grasp or define to our satisfaction. Witness Augustine's frustration with
the whole question and his finally tossing it all back in God's lap.

Augustine could as easily have used the word consciousness instead of time itself.
For without consciousness time does not exist. We could think of consciousness,
using his terms, as the presence of a present -- or, if you will, being present
in one (or all) of these three sorts of presents. That is what it seems to me
dreams are: the triumph of consciousness over the various kinds of waking time;
thought, as Augustine would say, wandering "amidst times," guided only by the
transcendent lure of free association, which is nothing more than the confusion
of times caused by lines of resemblance extending through the events of memory.
In this, dreams behave like a vacuum. In a vacuum a lead ball and a feather fall
at the same speed. So too a dream, like a vacuum, is empty of chronological and
spatial "friction." It knows no distinctions in nearness or farness (in time or
space) or in weight (importance, size). In dreams all objects (images) fall at
the same rate of speed, precisely as any square millimeter of a Cézanne
canvas is as important, expressive, or as near/far as any other. The painting
does not get more important as it nears the face of its subject. So too, all dream
objects are drawn into existence by the same gravity of association.

What a great satisfaction it was recently to come upon a passage in Umberto Eco's
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, in which Eco is exploring the mysteries
of the imperfect tense in our grammar. It is "a very interesting tense," he says,
"because it is both durative and iterative. As a durative, it tells us that something
was happening in the past but does not give us any precise time, and the beginning
and the end of the action are unknown. As an iterative, it implies that the action
has been repeated. But one is never certain when it is iterative, when it is durative,
or when it is both." And he adds that "it is the ambiguity of [the imperfect]
tense that makes it the most suitable for recounting dreams or nightmares" (1994,
12-13). One is left to conclude that dreams themselves are the essence of "imperfection"
in just this double way of putting us "amidst times," of condensing duration and
iteration into one. And it seems reasonable to think that if our grammar needs
the imperfect tense as a sort of 'et cetera' tense to account for temporal ambiguity,
we have been given the dream -- though no one knows to what end -- as the complementary
alternative to unambiguous waking life in which time is told by the clock. It
seems almost as if it were biologically necessary that the body/mind that is pinned
down in the strict space and time of daily life (where you can get killed by a
flying object) should require an instrument by which it could wander without restriction
through a world of pure possibility. Maybe that isn't why nature gave us the dream,
but it's an awfully nice dividend to have.

As I say, this fact is entirely lost on the dreamer -- another frustration! The
poor dreamer misses the uniqueness of dreaming while the dream is going on and
she loses the wonder of dreaming when she wakes up. And here indeed is another
deep paradox of dreaming: each moment of a dream co-exists as both a recollection
and an original event, as a detemporalized past reappearing as a never-before-experienced
present. At the bottom, then, every dream is a conflation of times. You say at
breakfast, "I dreamed of mother last night," scarcely thinking that mother is
dead and that what you saw and talked to in the dream was a lifetime of mother-memories
sharpened into a single image about whose edges, however clear otherwise, there
is a faint halo of unreliability. However clear and vivid the dream, mother was
both uniquely actual and imperfect, in Eco's double sense of being a duration
and a self-repetition. The frustration is that one becomes so used to the dream
world, or so accommodated to the futility of grasping it, that it finally becomes
as pedestrian as the spacetime of waking reality. Only when you wake up, still
within the penumbra of the dream, do you think about it at all: but there is no
way to get it back, or to understand what it is or what it means. Finally, you
end up saying "I dreamed of mother last night," with a slight ironical smile,
and letting it go at that, as if there were no point in telling the dream but
it ought somehow to be said aloud that you dreamed it, before the fact is swallowed
in the urgent and unambiguous business of the day.

A brief statement about "methodology" is in order. The evidentiary problem in
writing about dreams is notorious. There is no artifact that can be shared, no
direct means of examination, and no way to prove a hypothesis -- including the
claim that we actually experience our dreams (I examine this problem in Chapters
3 and 9.). In short, the object of inquiry does not exist. The only hope is that
the memory of having dreamed will serve as a verifier of the experience and that
intuitive agreement might be achieved by the study of sample dreams that can be
reflected against the reader's own experience. As a consequence, the "argument"
of my book does not proceed in interlocking stages, each chapter building on the
previous one, to a summarizing conclusion. Indeed, the book closes with a chapter
that is as close to memoir as it is to theory or hypothesis. I take some comfort
in the precedent that a good deal of phenomenological description flirts with
autobiography; that is, it relies on first-hand intuitive experience as the source
of its evidence, and in doing so it engages in what Maurice Natanson calls "methodological
solipsism" (1974, 243). While my perspective, in the main, is phenomenological,
it is so in the loose sense that poetry can be considered a species of phenomenology.
The business of poetry, as Shelley puts it in the Defense, is to compel us "to
feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know." The poet "purges
from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder
of our being." This passage may seem dated, but it is effectively what Victor
Shklovsky was saying about art in his famous essay of 1917 on "defamiliarization"
(1965). To put it another way, phenomenology, as Bruce Wilshire says, is "the
systematic attempt to unmask the obvious" (1982, 11), and I think much the same
thing could be said about poetry, if not all art.

Few human experiences are, in one sense, as "obvious" as the dream; unmasking
the dream in objective scientific language may be possible, but I doubt that the
result would be of much interest to dreamers. Anyway, I find myself continually
resorting to the figural and analogical techniques of poetry as a means of bringing
the experience of dreaming to what clarity I can for my imagined audience -- readers
who might have wondered about the same questions respecting their own dream life.
Though the chapters could probably be read in almost any order without serious
confusion, they do build on each other in complementary ways. Thus by the word
reflections in my title I refer not only to my own thoughts on each subject but
also to the reciprocal way I hope they reflect on and enlarge each other. I think
of the book as being cubistic in design, rather as if one were looking into a
room through various windows and seeing the same interior from different points
of view.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto (1994). Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.